Freud’s impact on the 20th century has been immense, and so far at least incalculable. No field of intellectual or cultural life has been left untouched by the new and radical mode of analysis he initiated. Religion, in particular, has been deeply affected, not only because Freud possessed an interest in religious problems that grew with the years, but also because he was always probing into matters that are of genuine religious concern, such as human nature and destiny, the meaning of life and death, the relation of man to his fellow men in society. Theologians have for some time acknowledged the power and relevance of Freud’s thinking for their field of concern. What is it that they have found so significant in the work of this avowed, even militant, atheist? Why is it that they have tended to prefer Freud’s views to the more conciliatory attitudes of the post-Freudian revisionists? An attempt to answer these questions may cast light on the elements of enduring value in Freud’s wrestling with the basic problems of human life.

All of Freud’s thinking about human life hinges on a twofold dualism: the dualism of ego and id within the psyche, and the dualism of individual and society within the culture. The two dualisms are not unrelated.

In his mature account of the structure and “topography” of the psyche, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that it is the id, the repository of the deep instinctual drives, which is the dynamic part of the self. It is the “oldest of mental provinces and agencies,” it is wholly unconscious, and it supplies the psychic energy for the functioning of the whole organism. Its law is to press for immediate gratification: “instinctual cathexes seeking discharge—that is all that the id contains.” The id knows only the pleasure principle, which it obeys “inexorably.” Such gratification of instinct is “happiness”; indeed, Freud often speaks as though it were the very purpose of life.¹ At any rate, it is the primordial law of the organism.

But the immediate satisfaction for which these instincts in the id press might well imperil the entire organism by bringing it into conflict with its environment, natural and social. About this the id knows and cares nothing, since it is governed entirely by the pleasure principle. The survival of the organism requires the functioning of another agency that will restrain and control the id. This agency is the ego, described by Freud as “a special organization which henceforward acts as an intermediary between the id and the external world.” The ego is concerned with “keeping down the instinctual claims of the id,” but also with “discovering the most favorable and least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account.” It is the ego’s task, in short, “to mediate between the pretensions of the id and the preventions of the outer world.” To achieve this purpose, the mature ego operates with the reality principle; it is the rational element of the self. In a word, “the ego stands for reason and circumspection, while the id stands for the untamed passions.”

The picture becomes even more complicated as we recognize a third agency in the psychic life, the superego, the internalized “successor and representative of the parents and educators,” which stands over the ego, out of which it has emerged, as an inward monitor, exercising the powers of “observation, criticism, and prohibition.” Assailed by the id, which demands instinctual gratification, and harassed by the superego, which keeps watch and threatens lest its rigid standards be violated, the poor ego must try to promote “reason and sanity” as best it can in order to preserve the organism and see that instinctual gratification takes place in a manner that is not self-destructive.

The conflict taking place, within the depths of the psyche, between the ego and the id is also writ large in the life of society. The ego, remember, is described by Freud as an “intermediary between the id and the external world,” while the superego, in whose shadow the ego operates, is characterized as the outcome of a process by which “part of the inhibiting forces of the outer world become internalized.” The inner tension between the ego and the id is thus reflected in the tension between the self and the outer world, since the unregulated gratification of instinctual drives would not only disrupt the psyche, but would also make the coexistence of man with man in society impossible.

For Freud, the very possibility of social coherence constitutes a grave problem. He sees human community emerging under the influence of the two great forces Eros and Ananke, love and necessity—the former by giving the male a “motive for keeping the female, or rather, his sexual objects, with him”; the latter by bringing about some sort of cooperation for work. But these forces, Freud feels, would hardly of themselves suffice to sustain society and “domesticate” man, who is basically so anti-social. Something more is necessary if men are to survive. That something is supplied with the emergence of culture or civilization.

_____________

Essentially, what Freud means by culture in this connection is the vast and intricate complex of psychological and institutional devices by which society is held together and man converted into a social being. The superstructure of culture is vast and far-reaching, and no one admires the fine flowers of cultural creativity more than Freud; but no one can be more pragmatic, more realistic—more crude, some would say—than he in interpreting its social function. Culture demands increasing amounts of instinctual renunciation, Freud insists. This is so because, as we have seen, unrestricted and unregulated instinctual expression would make social life impossible; it is so for the even more important reason that cultural creativity requires a considerable amount of psychic energy, to be obtained only by diverting it from its primary instinctual aims, sex and aggression. Extensive “restrictions on the sexual life” are required if any society at all is to be possible. Moreover, “culture obeys the laws of psychological economic necessity in making the restrictions, for it obtains a great part of the mental energy it needs by subtracting it from sexuality.” A good deal of the sexual energy is “sublimated” and transformed into what Freud calls “aim-inhibited libido,” which helps “strengthen communities by bonds of friendship.” Freud is fascinated by the “law of love,” the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This “law” is absurd on all “rational” grounds, he feels—yet necessary for civilization. “Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement,” he says. “Hence its system of methods by which mankind is to be driven to identifications and aim-inhibited love relationships; hence the restrictions on sexual life; and hence, too, its ideal command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, which is really justified by the fact that nothing is so completely at variance with original human nature as this.” Unfortunately, however, Freud acknowledges, such extremities of “aim-inhibited friendliness” as are required by the “law of love” are possible only for a very few. St. Francis is his favorite example.

For, after all, it is man’s aggressiveness that is the “most powerful obstacle to culture” and social cooperation. What means does civilization employ to control this self-destructive aggressiveness in man? As with sex, aggression has to be sharply restricted by repression and other devices. As with sex, too, there are carefully regulated and socially sanctioned forms of expression. As Gregory Zilboorg points out in Mind, Medicine, and Man, “direct violence in a social setting becomes temporarily an ally of both the ego and the superego; the individual participating in an act of violence of a social nature—whether he is a striker, a revolutionist, a soldier, or a policeman—rarely if ever feels guilty about it. . . . The superego lends its full support to the ego in that it justifies the violence on grounds of ethical social principles.” In this way a certain amount of aggression can be gratified not only without endangering the position of the ego and social control, but even in a manner that strengthens it.

But the most subtle device by which society protects itself against the disruptive forces of human aggression is the introjection of the latter into the superego. The aggressiveness is turned inward and supplies the stern superego with its power to keep the ego, and through the ego the id, in line. “Civilization,” Freud notes with telling effect, “thus obtains mastery over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by enfeebling and disarming it, and setting up an institution within their minds to keep watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” The supreme irony of the situation is, of course, that the power by which aggressiveness is controlled is derived from the very aggressiveness itself.

Freud goes even further. In his studies of group psychology he suggests that an essential factor in the cohesion of the group, and in group relations generally, is the projection by all members of the group of their superego onto a single figure, the leader. Where no leader figure emerges as a sort of corporate superego, the culture is enfeebled and confused, Freud feels. This was his criticism of American civilization in the 1920’s, where (according to him) “leading personalities failed to acquire the significance that should fall to them in the process of group formation.”²

Culture accomplishes an amazing work, but can it do more than establish a precarious balance that is always threatened from below? Freud points to “the difficulties inherent in the very nature of culture, which,” according to him, “will not yield to any efforts at reform.” “Every culture,” he repeats, “is based on coercion and instinctual renunciation.” He therefore warns against the panacea-mongers with their schemes for achieving a perfect adjustment of man and society. “A great part of the struggles of mankind,” he says, “center around the single task of finding some expedient . . . solution between . . . individual claims and those of the civilized community; it is one of the problems of man’s fate whether this solution can be arrived at in some particular form of culture, or whether the conflict will prove irreconcilable. . . . The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the cultural process developed in it will succeed in mastering the derangements of communal life caused by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” On this ominous note Freud ends his remarkable tract, Civilization and Its Discontents, upon which I have mainly drawn for this exposition.

_____________

When we turn to Erich Fromm, the most influential of the neo-Freudian revisionists, we enter, as it were, a new world. Where Freud is dualistic, Fromm is harmonistic; where Freud is somber, even pessimistic, Fromm exhibits an amazing confidence in the possibilities of human progress; where Freud assumes the posture of a disillusioned observer, Fromm is always the reformer.

To Fromm, man is not divided against himself in the very structure of the psyche, but is essentially unified, intact, perfect. The imperfections and distortions of human nature Fromm traces to the corrupting effects of man’s culture.

Fromm today still wavers between his earlier conception that it is “the social process which creates man” (Escape from Freedom) and his more recent view that there is a normative human nature which “is the same for man in all ages and all cultures” (The Sane Society). But however man is understood, he is seen as essentially good and rational; there is practically no vestige in Fromm of the dark Freudian picture of the primordial struggle between ego, superego, and id in the depths of the self. All man really wants, according to Fromm, is to “relate himself to the world lovingly . . . [to] use his reason to grasp reality objectively, [to] experience himself as a unique individual entity, and at the same time one with his fellow man, [to be] one who is not subject to irrational authority, [but who] accepts willingly the authority of conscience and reason. . . .” That is all man wants to be, but society won’t let him, at least society hitherto hasn’t let him. The locus of evil and irrationality is thus not in man but in the society. The real conflict, in other words, is between good, healthy human nature on the one side, and a “sick” society on the other.

Viewing man and society from this angle, Fromm sees the real problem not as the taming of the innate destructive drives in man through the devices and institutions of civilization, but as the reconstruction of society to fit normative human nature. Once such reconstruction is achieved—and to Fromm it is well within the realm of human achievement—once society is restored to “sanity,” the essential goodness and rationality of human nature will have the opportunity of expressing itself in social life. Sane men in a sane society might be described as Fromm’s vision: and men become sane because they have a sane society to live in, a society that will not distort or corrupt their personalities. “Fromm promises the advent of loving, creative, and reasonable man”—Paul Kecskemeti thus acutely summarizes the argument of The Sane Society (in “The All-Powerful ‘I’,” COMMENTARY, February 1956)—“on condition that society recognizes the sovereignty of the individual. Society can become perfect because human nature already is: the only thing needed is that society no longer dim the light of natural perfection.”

It is possible to pay tribute to the brilliance, even profundity, of much of Fromm’s criticism of contemporary culture without overlooking the naivety of the panacea he offers for our ills. “The only alternative to the danger of robotism,” he says, “is humanistic communitarianism”—by which he means the restructuring of society into small and decentralized communal entities in which the functions of worker and manager will somehow be combined. How, in the face of all experience, Fromm can believe such combination to be really possible, or why he should assume that were it achieved there would be nothing in life but love, rationality, and creativeness, is far from clear. But Fromm’s basic notion of man and society is clear enough. And it is so different from Freud’s that one might not know that it is the same man and the same society that they are talking about.

_____________

Both Freud and Fromm see man and society in conflict. But Freud sees the conflict as one between man’s “biological self,” with its destructive instinctual drives, and society, with its apparatus of coercion and enforced renunciation. Freud’s view, in short, is Hobbesean, both in its conception of man and in its notion of the function of society. “There are present in all men,” Freud says in The Future of an Illusion, “destructive and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural tendencies.” “Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of [instinctual] happiness for a measure of security” (Civilization and Its Discontents). Fromm, on the other hand, is a most manifest Rousseauean: man is born free and good, only to be enslaved and corrupted by an evil society. Since Freud finds the evil drive in man’s biologic nature, he refuses to reassure us by holding out the possibility of a cure for the “discontents” of civilization. Fromm has his program all ready.

Freud and Fromm are both essentially rationalists, but of very different kinds. It may seem strange to call Freud a rationalist, but David Riesman not only calls him that (in Individualism Reconsidered), he goes on to say that “it would be difficult to find anyone in the Enlightenment who was more so.” For reason is Freud’s god, and truth—which he identifies with scientific truth—the only epiphany he recognizes. He is even a little Platonic in his rationalism. “One might,” he says with a gesture at Plato’s celebrated figure of the rider and the chariot, “compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse,” “the ego standing for reason . . . [and] the id standing for the untamed passions.” His whole conception of the psychoanalytic cure is rationalistic, for, as Fromm correctly points out, Freud’s “psychoanalysis is the attempt to uncover the truth about oneself. . . . The aim of the cure is the restoring of health, and the remedies are truth and reason” (Escape from Freedom).

Freud’s rationalism is reflected in the way he envisages the conflict within the self. To him it is essentially a division between the ego and the id, between the reason and the passions, with the superego above as a stern internalized monitor. He does not see that the conflict in the self is not merely the assailment of the ego by the id and its harassment by the superego, but is actually the self divided against itself at all levels—the cleft runs through the ego, superego, and id alike, and not merely between them. Because he does not see this, his picture of the ego strikes one as altogether too simple. The ego can hardly be as rational as Freud makes it out to be.

Even in his view of society, Freud permits a strong element of rationalism to creep in, particularly when he deals with religion. To Freud, religion is, of course, an “illusion,” but it is an illusion which somehow does not meet with the same kind of tolerant understanding that he extends to most other forms of human self-deception. Now suddenly he discovers that “the time has probably come to replace the consequences of repression by rational mental effort,” and so he makes a plea, in just so many words, for “a purely rational basis for cultural laws” (The Future of an Illusion). This from Freud, who more than anyone else has convinced us that society and culture cannot have any “purely rational basis”! So Freud’s rationalism penetrates even his social thinking. Yet, on the whole, it is a secondary and muted influence in this area, at least so long as he keeps away from religion.

Fromm is somewhat less rationalistic in his view of the self, for his picture of human normativity is complex and many-sided. But he makes up for that by his extreme social and political rationalism, which expresses itself in a simple-minded Utopian ism that clings to an optimistic faith in schemes of social reconstruction and their power to achieve perfection. Freud is, in a sense, a Voltairean: reason should rule society through a rational, scientific-minded elite, taking account of, perhaps even manipulating, the illusions and self-deceptions of the mass of mankind. Fromm, I emphasize again, is essentially a Rousseauean, who envisages man in his perfection and looks to the perfect—i.e. the rational—society to release this perfection in man.

Both Freud and Fromm are naturalists—Freud a biologistic naturalist and Fromm largely of the culturistic variety. Freud’s biologism may be interpreted as a reflection of the late 19th-century scientific outlook, which was biological, evolutionary, and materialistic. Fromm’s culturism may, in much the same way, be understood as a reflection of the current scientific mind, with its sociological bias and its uneasy hesitation between a sociological relativism and the effort to find some fixed point in a “pan-human” normative type. But while all this is no doubt true, it is important not to overlook that Freud’s biologism and Fromm’s culturism both have deeper significance. Insistence on the “biological self” is so necessary for Freud because, as Lionel Trilling has pointed out (Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture), this “biological self” represents the “hard, irreducible stubborn core from which the culture may be judged.” Freud “needed to believe that there was some point at which it was possible to stand beyond the reach of culture,” and that point he found in the inviolable “biological self.” Fromm, on the other hand, doubtless finds culturism so appealing because he is passionately convinced that the perfect society (which he imagines to be achievable in history) will provide the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of the perfect man. The type of naturalism each espouses is thus seen to be closely related to his underlying interest and concern.

_____________

Both men very largely misunderstand the inner relation of the self and society. To Freud, the self is essentially individualistic, a self-contained entity prior to society and requiring community for external reasons. Society is, at bottom, no more than an aggregation of individual selves held together by derivative psychological bonds. Freud does not see what the Jewish-Christian tradition has always stressed, and what modern existentialists such as Buber, Jaspers, and Marcel are re-emphasizing, that the human self emerges only in community and has no real existence apart from it. The self is not prior to society, but coeval with it. Fromm, on the other hand, sometimes tends to lose the self in his preoccupation with the “right” social order that he thinks the self needs for its fulfillment; he never seems to realize that even the best social order necessarily institutionalizes—and therefore corrupts as well as implements—the I-Thou community which is the self’s true context of being. In neither system does the self really come into its own.

Nor can either system do full justice to the self in its “dramas of history.” Freud turns to the multifarious diversity of the historical process primarily to find invariant, biologically grounded patterns. Fromm’s interest in history, like Rousseau’s, is to lay bare the many ways in which evil institutions have corrupted men in the past. Neither understands the full historicity of man, or what this implies for human existence, because neither has a proper sense of human transcendence, of the capacity of the self to transcend all the coherences, social as well as biological, through which it is provisionally defined and in which it is provisionally enclosed. Freud tries to guarantee the integrity of the human self by making it biological, Fromm by grounding it in a normative human nature “the same for man in all ages and all cultures.” Neither sees it, where Christian thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr have placed it, in the dimension of being where the “self is enabled to stand as it were above the structures and coherences of the world” facing the eternal (The Self and the Dramas of History).

In such an ultimate perspective, Freud’s biologism must be judged inadequate and misleading. Yet it does contain a profound insight which the idealistic and the spiritually minded often tend to forget: man’s inescapable biological grounding. If it is true, as Paul Tillich insists (in The Courage to Be), that “in man nothing is ‘merely biological,’” it is also true, as Tillich goes on to say, that “in man . . . nothing is ‘merely spiritual.’” “Every cell of [man’s] body participates in his freedom,” but “every act of his spiritual creativity is nourished by his vital dynamics.” We have Freud to thank for emphasizing one half of this truth. Fromm in his own way stresses the other half, by constantly emphasizing that man’s nature is more than biological. But a prisoner of his naturalistic presuppositions, he cannot really say what this “beyond-the-biological” is and how it manifests itself in man.

Freud’s biologism fosters his stubborn insistence that the trouble lies deep in man, and is not simply the result of adverse social conditions. Freud’s view is, as Robert K. Merton has suggested, a biologistic “variety of the ‘original sin’ doctrine.”³ Despite its obvious shortcomings, it preserves him from the pitfalls of social utopianism and perfectionism. It brings him to an understanding of what Niebuhr in our own day has insisted on, that history remains ambiguous to the very end.

Fromm’s Rousseauism very largely blinds him to this hard wisdom. For him, “sin” is socially derived, and history is ultimately redeemable through human effort. Yet Fromm is surely right in feeling that human aggression and destructiveness are not merely biological, but are somehow emergent out of the human situation (even if Fromm mistakenly identifies the human situation with the social). What both Freud and Fromm lack, it seems to me, is some of the insight that has come down to us in the Biblical tradition, and that has recently been restated by a number of existentialists. It is not the biological constitution of man that is responsible for the human evil in history, nor is it the social order, although both the biological constitution and the social order are involved. Out of man’s existential situation—out of the tension between his self-transcending freedom and the inherent limitations of his creatureliness—are engendered the basic insecurity and anxiety which prompt him to “pride” (in the theological sense) and self-aggrandizement. This “pride” and this self-aggrandizement enlist all suitable biological impulses in their service and exploit all serviceable social institutions, but they are not themselves the product of either. They emerge out of the depths of the self in its existential situation. Freud and Fromm each sees an aspect of this truth, but Freud, I feel, somehow comes closer.

_____________

If we were to permit ourselves a theological vocabulary, we might, I think, without going too far afield, say that Freud tends to a Manicheanism of a biologistic kind, while Fromm tends to an extreme Pelagianism which glorifies human autonomy and holds man to be sufficient unto himself for salvation. Freud does not see that the tragic dualism pervading human life, however real and beyond the reach of idealistic conjurations, can be neither the first nor the last word on human destiny. Fromm, on the other hand, seems unable to consider that man’s desperate plight today, which he describes with such feeling, may be, in part at least, the direct consequence of the unbridled pretensions to autonomy that have characterized modern culture from the Renaissance to our own time. Freud sees man desperately caught between the upper and nether millstones of his instincts and his culture; Fromm exalts the “all-powerful ‘I.’” Neither really understands man’s plight or man’s hope.

Gregory Zilboorg is right in pointing out that what Freud devoted his life to studying was the “psychological reactions of man in the state of sin”; but Freud was not fully aware of what he was doing. He took the “fallen,” the sinful state of man, the state of man with which he was empirically acquainted—man at war with himself and his fellow men—as man’s original and, so to speak, normative condition. His attitude was therefore deeply pessimistic, though his pessimism was inconsistently relieved here and there by a dim hope engendered out of an irrational faith in reason. Fromm, on the other hand, like all idealists, simply ignores the “fall,” brushes aside the insistent lessons of experience, and deals with man as though he were still in his “original rightness.” No wonder the glorious creature he describes—glorious when uncorrupted by an evil society—bears little resemblance to Freud’s aggressive, libidinal being whom civilization has to beguile and restrain. Fromm’s man is essentially untouched by the dreadful disorder of human sinfulness; Freud’s man is an imperfectly tamed beast desperately trying to domesticate himself. Neither Freud nor Fromm sees man in his full complexity and his many dimensions, in both his “grandeur” and his “misery,” at once in the perfection of his original creation and in the radical imperfection of his actual existence. It was to them both that Pascal was speaking when he described his purpose and vocation: “If anyone exalts man, I humble him; if anyone humbles man, I exalt him; and I always contradict him until he understands what an incomprehensible monster man is.”

One could go on drawing these comparisons indefinitely, displaying the relative strength and weaknesses of Freud and the revisionists. We cannot accept either completely, and we can certainly learn from both. Is there no way we can judge between them, and in the end prefer one to the other? I think we can, though of course one’s judgment will depend on one’s fundamental philosophical and theological outlook. For myself, I think that it is Freud who speaks with greater power and out of a deeper reality than do any of the revisionists, even when he speaks of religion, of which he apparently understands so little. Let me say why.

_____________

The first thing modern man needs to know, it seems to me, is that his multitude of troubles have their origin in something radically wrong within himself which requires an equally radical cure. He must come to see the evil and irrationality infecting his existence from within and reaching out to all the enterprises in which he is engaged before he can possibly open himself to the grace of God and receive the courage and insight to deal with life in creative fashion. Freud is always telling us the first part of this truth, with deep earnestness and conviction. He will not permit us to exculpate ourselves as blameless innocents victimized by history, society, or culture—which exculpation is precisely what Fromm’s social philosophy offers. Freud’s teaching reinforces the Jewish-Christian conviction of the dubiousness of all human virtue and the ambiguity of all human achievements; Fromm’s repeats the Enlightenment themes of the essential innocence of man, the wickedness of existing society, and man’s unlimited power to establish the Kingdom of God on earth—without God. Freud too left God out of his calculations, but he did not pretend to do God’s work for him. For that we may be grateful.

We may be grateful, too, for Freud’s indignant rejection of sham. Consider his views on religion. He asserts over and over again that God is nothing but the “deified father” who “at one time walked incarnate on the earth,” that religion is the “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity” through which “the civilized individual must pass on his way from childhood to maturity,” that the dissipation of the religious “illusion” is the next task of human reason. In propounding these views, which he does not hesitate to call “definite conclusions,” Freud obviously goes far beyond the psychoanalytic evidence, and tries to make his data bear the burden of a “philosophy” which even his most ardent admirers have admitted to be shallow, crude, and confused. There is, too, a note of strident intransigency in his manner that reminds one uncomfortably of the village atheist.

Some of Freud’s disciples and followers have been embarrassed by this side of the master’s thought, and have attempted to show that psychoanalysis, even Freudian psychoanalysis, is not really hostile to religion. In the November 1953 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Jules H. Masserman, the distinguished teacher and writer on psychoanalysis, published an article entitled “Faith and Delusion in Psychotherapy: The Ur-Defenses of Man,” in which he sensationally reverses Freud. Freud considered religion to be an illusion, and good rationalist that he was—at least in this sphere—he felt it his duty to try to dissipate the illusion. Psychic disturbances he regarded as at bottom disturbances of the patient’s sense of reality; the underlying aim of psychotherapy, as I have pointed out, he held to be the restoration of that sense, with the consequent strengthening of the ego (that is, the reason) over against the id and the superego. Masserman, turning Freud upside down, asks if it is not possible that “psychotherapy actually consists in the reestablishment of certain delusions necessary to mankind?” One such “necessary” delusion he finds in religion, which, he proceeds to show, consists of certain “curiously unrealistic, paradoxical, but ubiquitous Ur-defenses of man,” as “essential to man’s ‘psychic’ economy as [physiological processes] are necessary to the maintenance of his bodily integrity.” What are these “Ur-defenses of Man”? Masserman mentions three, relating each to some phase of infantile experience: (1) “the delusion of invulnerability and immortality”; (2) “the delusion of the omnipotent [divine] servant,” God always at the command of man; and (3) the delusion of “man’s kindness to man,” that “in time of need one can seek and actually obtain succor from one’s fellow man.” So far from condemning these illusory beliefs “men cherish and live by,” Masserman even raises the question of whether it would not be better to drop the word “delusion” in dealing with them, though of course they are “unrealistic.” “As to therapy,” he goes on, “we dare not disregard the evidence that delusions, in a deeply humanitarian sense, are . . . sacred, and that we tamper with them at our patient’s—and our own—peril.”

_____________

There we have it. What Freud regards with such distate as irrational delusions, Masserman holds to be “essential convictions . . . sacred . . . necessary to man’s very existence.” What Freud, in his rationalism, is so intent upon dissipating, Masserman urges us to cherish. On a psychoanalytic basis, mind you, Masserman reverses Freud and vindicates religion.

But what kind of religion does he vindicate? The very beliefs Dr. Masserman strives to vindicate as the essentials of religion, because they are the Ur-defenses of man, are the beliefs that Biblical faith is especially concerned to question and reject. Surely it is obvious that in Biblical faith man is not immortal and invulnerable; he is as the grass that withereth, here today and gone tomorrow, and whatever “eternal life” he may look forward to, or hope for, comes to him not by virtue of his nature but as the promise and grace of God. As for the second article in Dr. Masserman’s creed, the belief in God as “omnipotent servant,” merely to state this belief is to indicate how abhorrent it is to Biblical faith, in which it is God who is sovereign lord and man his servant or slave. Nor does the third Ur-defense fare better. The Bible warns against illusions about simple human good will: “The heart [of man] is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

Dr. Masserman’s Freudian vindication of religion against Freud is something that the man of Biblical faith cannot easily accept. Freud, with his rejection of religion, was closer to—or at least less distant from—the Biblical position than is Dr. Masserman with his vindication of it. For Freud regarded the religious beliefs that Dr. Masserman calls the “Ur-defenses of man” as essentially delusions, and here Biblical faith agrees with him: they are delusions. Freud’s own Ur-defense was his faith in science; this, too, Biblical religion calls idolatrous and delusive. It is, therefore, even more radical than Freud, but it cannot help recognizing, it seems to me, that in Freud’s iconoclasm there is an aspect of God’s truth that is almost completely lost in the “pro-religionism” of our time.

Much of what Freud took for religion was sham, and deserved his hostility. Above all, he hated sham. He had nothing but contempt for those who presented religion under false colors so as to deprive it of its “scandal” and challenge. In the midst of one of his diatribes against religion, he thunders: “One would like to count oneself among the believers so as to admonish the philosophers who try to preserve the God of religion by substituting for him an impersonal, shadowy, abstract principle, and say [to them]: ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.’”

It is in such outbursts, reflecting a spirit that runs right through his writings, that one who espouses a faith he rejected, and rejects the faith he espoused, can nevertheless see in Sig-mund Freud, despite himself, a witness to the God of Truth.

_____________

¹ “The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life. This consists of the satisfaction of its innate needs” (An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

² “This danger [a state one may call “la misère psychologique” of groups] is most menacing where the social forces of cohesion consist predominantly of identifications of the individuals in the group with one another, whilst leading personalities fail to acquire the significance that should fall to them in the process of group formation. The state of civilization in America at the present day offers a good opportunity for studying this injurious effect of civilization which we have reason to dread. But I will resist the temptation to enter upon a criticism of American culture. I have no desire to give the impression that I would employ American methods myself” (Civilization and Its Discontents).

³ Social Theory and Social Structure (1949). See also Zilboorg: “Even the concept of original sin or of the original fall of man finds its empirical counterpart in the findings of psychoanalysis” (Mind, Medicine, and Man).

_____________